Gary's Super Affiliate Challenge Progress Update #3

bynightwatch

830 followers

Updated 6 years ago

I figured it was time for another update on my progress in the Super Affiliate Challenge.

I mentioned in my previous update that I had fallen behind by several weeks. At that stage (April 12), I had just completed the Month 1 training.

Now here, on April 30, I'm about half way through the Month 2 Training. So I haven't caught up as I'd hoped.

Still, there has been progress and here's where things stand:

• 19 posts published
  
• 116 comments published - half of these are mine as I reply to every comment received
  
• All posts now have comments

Two posts - How to Build An Email List The Smart Way and Drive YouTube Traffic To Your Squeeze Pages Like Sarah Staar - have 16 and 18 comments each respectively. And neither are even my most popular post.

That's my Wealthy Affiliate Review with 108 page views in April. I haven't managed to recruit any Premium members to WA however. But I did get two new free member signups.

I have promoted this post quite a lot which explains why it's my most popular post but I am disappointed that I couldn't recruit more people with it.

I did get one signup for Content Samurai though, which pays a monthly commission. This is the online video creation service I use to make my videos.

Most of the comments I get on my posts come from the WA community. I started using the SiteComments module to get some additional comments. The other place I get comments from is the Traffic Exchange For Bloggers group on Facebook. I've also had a few comments from general people visiting the site. Another site I've started submitting my post links to is Readory.com.

On the rankings front, I'm tracking 96 keywords and only 10 of those have ranked (I'm using Jaaxy to track rankings).

Of those 10 keywords, the highest is ranked #32 for my Landing Page Monkey Review post.

My site has returned to its #1 postion on Bing and is bobbing about between position #1 and #2 on Yahoo. No sign of it being ranked on Google yet.

I'm having trouble getting social shares for the site recognized. At least as far as my share button widget (Sumo) is concerned. I've submitted my site (and its posts) to Facebook (shares do get counted), Pinterest (shares do get counted), Google Plus (shares don't get counted), StumbleUpon (shares don't get counted) and Twitter (again, shares don't get counted).

I don't know if this is something to do with the share button plugin or if shares aren't being counted on some sites for some reason. I have tried a couple of other social button plugins and they're not showing the counts either. So it doesn't look like it's down to a buggy plugin.

When I wrote my previous post on April 12, my site had received 111 visitors in the previous 28 days (about 4 per day). Between then and now, I've received 266 additional vistors, so traffic is starting to ramp up. I'm now getting 14-15 visits per day on average.

There were a couple of major spikes in visitor numbers which have probably skewed that figure somewhat. You can seem them in this image:

In March, the site received just 55 visitors whereas in April, 366 people stopped by. A six-fold increase in traffic.

The number of sessions went up almost 5 times from 102 in March to 497 in April.

Unfortunately, the Bounce Rate increased from an average of 64.71% in March to 81.29%. The time spent by visitors on the site decreased from an average of 3m 13s in March to 2m 20s in April.

These are March's stats:

This could just be down to WA members visiting the site, skimming posts to leave comments rather than putting in the time to fully read the posts.

One reason I only published a handul of posts since my previous update is because I've been spending quite a bit of time setting up my emails for my mailing list. I also added an attention bar at the bottom of my pages to entice people to sign up to my mailing list.

I redesigned the optin form that appears at the bottom of my posts so it gives a better idea of what readers will get if they do sign up:

I managed to get my first 4 subscribers this month. A slow start, but I only started advertising my newsletter signup page once I had some emails ready to send out to them.

Feel free to sign up yourself. I'm giving access to a lot of useful list building and internet marketing information, weekly video tutorials, a weekly newsletter, a monthly full-color 32-page PDF magazine and some other surprises.

Hopefully it provides enough value to get people to sign up, without over-doing it.

I even created a video promo to advertise the newsletter:

Stuff Still To Do

I still have to complete Month 2 of the Super Affiliate Challenge and to get started on Month 3. Month 4 will become available in early May, so I've a fair bit of catching up to do.

Writing my posts is still the most time-consuming of the tasks as I do a lot of research prior to publishing a post.

I need to start promiting my newsletter more as well to start getting those all-important subscribers.

Any online business needs to build an email list. Email marketing is still the most profitable way to make money online. Check out my blog for some tips, advice and recommended tools.